Posts published by Caroline Hirsch

What we leave behind can be as telling as what we preserve. It’s with this idea in mind that the photographer Aurélien Villette explores and documents a variety of abandoned places — from the sacred to the industrial — for his “Spirit of Place” project, which is collected in a new book out this month from teNeues ($75). Villette has been intrigued by the “appropriation of space by man,” he says, ever since he was very young; the things that fascinated him growing up include “churches, stained-glass windows, cave paintings and hieroglyphs.”

In his travels since then, Villette has encountered countless spaces that were built according to the uses and fashions of the time, shaped by human ambition and ideology — producing “infinite architectural, artistic and artisanal richness; places full of enigma and mystery that still exist today.” Villette doesn’t assign titles to his photographs; he prefers, he says, to allow viewers to “imagine a past that maybe did not even exist.”

Having grown up skiing on the wintry slopes near Geneva, the documentary photographer François Schaer is completely in his element when faced with so-called jours blancs, literally “white days,” when visibility is greatly reduced on the ski slope due to the fog. “Jours Blancs” is also the title of Schaer’s new book, published by Kehrer Verlag. More than just a study in white, Schaer’s images irreverently explore how these snow-covered mountains provide pleasure and adventure. “I know and love snow a lot,” the photographer says. “I can tell that it is going to snow soon just because of its strange and particular humid smell. The moment I love the most for taking pictures of the mountains is when it is actually snowing; with blue sky, I prefer to simply enjoy the view.”

The art photographer Ansley West Rivers‘s “Seven Rivers” project began after a life-changing 25 days she spent floating the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 2011 — a trip that culminated with her drifting, under a full moon, to Lake Mead. As she recalls, “We had lived surrounded by the canyon walls for three weeks, so the abrupt transition was disorienting. The river we had developed such passion and love for over the last three weeks was now being choked into an eroding construction site. The dignity of the mighty Colorado was lost.”

The trip made Rivers “realize the importance of watersheds as maps,” she says, “for they tell the story of civilization past and present, as well as the landscape.” And it inspired a photography project that investigates the current state of the American river. As Rivers explains, the photographs aren’t intended as documentation, but rather to depict the “unseen changes” that human interference wreaks on each of these waterways. “The constructed images I make on each negative show the possibilities and effects of industry, global warming, agriculture, power, and the unquenchable demand for fresh water,” she says. “Each image depicts the journey each river takes and the struggles bound to every drop of water.”

Since it’s that spooky time of year, T checked in with the London-based photographer Will Sanders, who has a growing portfolio of Halloween-themed images taken over the years. “I’ve always really loved Halloween,” he says. “I love all the imagery and colors, and for some reason I find it quite comforting — maybe it’s the whole autumn thing.”

Recently, Sanders has been focusing on the costumed pups that roam his neighborhood, where a local charity called All Dogs Matter runs an annual Halloween dog walk at the Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath. A selection of images appears here. Sanders, a proud pup owner, points out that “the dog in the spider costume is our dog Odin; he won a rosette for that costume. The other black pug is called Boris who walks with Odin every week in our local park.”

A selection of “fortuitously obtained moments” captured between 2000 and 2014 by Mikiko Hara fill the pages of her new book, “These Are Days.” “My shooting style is so-called snapshot, so I can say all of my photographs were taken by a mere accident,” Hara says. “They are the photographs of somewhere yet nowhere.” The book includes landscapes and pictures of children, though her preferred subjects continue to be everyday women. “I had many chances to encounter an attractive woman who had an atmosphere that is not verbally expressible,” the artist explains. “It seems I’m always intuitively drawn to the people whose atmosphere can’t be easily described; their attractiveness that can’t be reduced to a simple word. In the case of other subjects, that is the same feeling that I have when I’m shooting.” Accordingly, Hara hopes that her imagery evokes viewers’ “ambivalent or unexplainable feelings, and resonates with their fragmented memories.”

“These Are Days” can be ordered through Osiris. More of Hara’s images are on view as part of the “In Focus: Tokyo” exhibit through Dec. 14 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, getty.edu.

Growing up on the forested volcanic slopes of the Big Island of Hawaii fueled the photographer Klea McKenna‘s fascination with nature. And her “No Light Unbroken” series is not only infused with nature, but essentially created by it. After getting frustrated early on with the predictability of straightforward photography, she turned to photograms for their ability to directly and physically capture the natural world. Her process involves placing an object on light-sensitive material and then exposing the composition to light; the resulting image is an imprint of that object. “I’m able to use this medium to allow a place for the elements to picture themselves,” explains McKenna, who works with rain, spiders and banana trees as her recurring subjects.

The rain images “began as an experiment, to see if it was possible to create a visual imprint of this experience we are all familiar with: the feeling of standing in the pouring rain in total darkness,” McKenna says. “Once I began making them, I became fascinated by the way that each rainstorm looked different: the patterns of a tropical downpour versus a winter drizzle. I’ve become obsessed with dots and drops.” As with her other work in the project, which is now on view now at Von Lintel Gallery in Los Angeles, the photographs embody the strangeness and drama that continue to draw her to the medium, and capture, she says, that sweet spot “where my own intention meets the unpredictable.”

Anyone interested in the postwar New York advertising circles portrayed in “Mad Men” will find delight in William Helburn’s upcoming book “Seventh and Madison.” The photographer, whose images appeared in the pages of magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Life, had an obvious sense of humor and adventure: in one image, he places a pair of models atop a crosswalk signal; in another he casts himself as the object of the model Dovima’s adoring gaze (in a bathtub).

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Helburn plainly loved his job: after all, he got to be creative, drive around in big cars and hang out with beautiful girls. “Dovima was marvelous,” the 90-year-old photographer recalls. “She was inventive. She posed and you loved everything she did.” In the mid-1960s, after he gained access to much-in-demand Jean Shrimpton through his friendship with Eileen and Jerry Ford, she took over as the object of his affections. “Always when I worked with a girl I was pretty much in love with them,” he says. “And I was in love with her. It caused a little friction in my life but I tried to keep it private.”

Helburn’s energetic images required meticulous preparation. “I limited myself by using a view camera,” he says, “always having to plan the picture and set the tripod. I liked the fact that I had crisp, sharp pictures but they still looked candid. In order to do that I had to dictate absolutely everything.” This included recruiting a police officer to direct traffic around his set, renting a cherry picker to place his models atop that crosswalk signal and removing the side windows from a car to eliminate bad reflections. But happy accidents, like the cop stepping into frame or a driver leaning forward to check out the girls teetering on the sign, always made him happy. “Those are moments that happen,” he says. “I can’t rehearse everything.”